The log cabin that your husband, my Uncle Steve, built from scratch in the Wisconsin north woods, by hand, measuring and cutting the logs, pouring cement, hand digging a well, stacking the stones for the fireplace, installing electricity. Walls and windows and ceilings and floors. Plus all the art work that hung from the walls, the landscapes and the portraits, the oils and the water colors, the output of his day job as an extraordinary artist. Now, seventy years later, it still stands, out living its creator by about thirty years and now, outliving you. It was (and still is) a simple structure, but to me, it was (and still is) grander than the Taj Mahal.

You were summertime, breakfast.

My dad, your brother. My Mom. My brothers and sister. Every summer, after you returned for summer vacation from your job teaching in California, we’d spend whatever time Dad got for vacation in our trailer house that doubled as a summer cabin and winter hunting shack, parked just over the small hill behind your cabin. And every year, beginning the first morning after we arrived, we’d wake, and one by one, each of us would make our way to your breakfast table, where you’d already be up and have the first shift of the endless breakfast sizzling loudly on your stove. Pancakes, French toast, fried or scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and sausage – whatever we wanted – we’d put our order in and within seconds we’d be sitting there, at your small round table, and a plate full of the world’s best breakfast would appear. One by one we’d file down, until all of us, including my mom and dad, would arrive while you worked tirelessly keeping the plates filled. The amazing thing was that when we were finished eating, filled up, nobody left. As good and plentiful as the food was, the conversation, the banter, the laughter, was always better, and we’d sit there, listening and talking and laughing, for a good four hours after the first straggler made his way down. Most of the laughter was at your’s and my dad’s expense, as we’d hear the same old but never tired stories and arguments that’d been festering since you were kids.

You were summertime, early mornings.

I remember walking with you, 6:15 A.M, the sun already out and warm on spectacular summer mornings, daylight alive with the sound of songbirds, the road speckled with smatterings of sunlight that pierced the trees that canopied the narrow county highway, back when it still ran along the Chippewa River, twenty years before they’d re-route and move it to the south, away from the steep and eroding river bank. We’d walk the half mile or so to the farm next door, that just happened to be the farm you and my dad grew up on, where you’d get a bottle of milk from Ken Schultz, the owner of the farm at the time, one of the nicest men in the world. I remember the milk being so fresh, and the cream that rose to the top of the glass bottles.

You were summertime, lazy afternoons and evenings.

Reading or fishing or exploring. Laughing, making puns, especially if your son Larry was home. Sitting in front of your fireplace in a rocking chair, reading The Yearling or The Call of the Wild or a Sherlock Holmes story, or a twist ending story by Saki or O’Henry or whatever else I pulled off of the bookshelves that lined your cabin’s living room. Or running outside and grabbing one of the fishing poles you always had leaning against the big tree at the top of the riverbank and running down the cement steps you’d laid to the shore, just past the confluence of the Flambeau and Chippewa rivers, where the Flambeau ended and the Chippewa went on. Casting my line for hours without a strike, the lack of action on my line and the long summer afternoons giving me room to explore all the wild fires burning wherever the current in the river and my imagination would take me.

You were summertime, ice cream scooped from big plastic buckets into crunchy cones kept in a glass jar in your cupboard.

Warm summer nights, cloudless skies lit by the pale light of a full moon and an infinity of stars and the ancient dust of the cosmos. More laughter and conversation, in your lamp-lit living room, you speculating on some philosophic theory you’d just read about or picking up on whatever argument you and Dad had left unresolved at breakfast.

You were summertime, captured.

The portrait of you Uncle Steve painted back in the sixties that still hangs on the wall above your fireplace. Your eyes burn fiercely, intensely, and it captures you, your essence, in a way only Steve could have, in a way I didn’t understand until only recently, that the fire your eyes burn with is the fire of your very soul, their intensity revealing the strength that drove you to such exceptional love of and devotion to family and friends, the same strength and stamina that enabled you to work long summer days in your flower gardens under the hot summer sun as late as last summer, despite being 94 years old, slight and frail, a shell of your former self.

You were summertime, some fifty years ago, when none of us realized just how young we were.

As I grow older, I find more and more that I am turning into my Father. It’s not so much similarities in physicality, although there has been the occasional sleepy eyed sight of him looking back at me in my bathroom mirror. No, it’s brain function, or maybe malfunction, that I’m noticing in my own internal processing, the same butchering of words and names that I used to find so amusing in my dad.

For years, my dad fought an undeclared war with the English language. He’d get hung up on a certain word and mispronounce it several ways, some subtle and some just bizarre. Sometimes, he’d even add a new syllable or two. For example, the word “vibrate” became “viabrate.” Back in the seventies, his insurance agent was a man named John Kuharich. For some reason, he had trouble with “Kuharich.” Some glitch in his brain couldn’t process “Kuharich,” and his attempts to say it produced results like “Krewharich,” ‘Kronurich,” and “Kuhatcher” before finally settling on “Kahoutec, agent John Kahoutec.”

I always found this to be extremely funny, until recently, when a similar glitch in my similar brain became evident. Just as my dad struggled with “Kuharich,” a word has emerged that has me totally befuddled when I try to say it. The only difference between the two of us is that “Kuharich” was the name of a relatively obscure insurance agent in a small town, while the word I’m having difficulty with has been one of the most frequently spoken words in the country, if not the entire world, over the past several weeks.

“Corona”

I can feel the cog wheels of my mechanical brain slowing down just looking at the word. It just doesn’t look or sound right. When in public, while maintaining a safe social distance of at least six feet, in conversation, I find myself referring to the Coranado or the Cordoba virus. The other person will very nicely and politely point out my error, that it’s Corona. This correction is accepted and processed until some 45 seconds later, when I hear myself saying something about the Coradabo virus.

The next thing I hear is the sound of my dad’s laughter, viabrating in my ears.

Those of you who occasionally read the drivel I post on this site may have noticed a recent plethora of mediocre poetry. This is mainly due to the fact that I’ve recently developed an interest in poetry. As amateurish as my poems have been so far, I chalk the dearth of quality up to the fact that I’m still learning the craft and remain a stumbling novice.

That was until tonight. Tonight, I finally broke through and wrote something that is undeniably good if not great. Best of all, it’s in the form of a haiku, and even better yet, it’s related to the holiday season.

Here without further ado is my masterpiece:

What's the Deal With Egg Nog
Egg nog in July
would be just as refeshing
as in December
Thanks, and Merry Christmas from DBD!!!

He still sees her as she was nearly forty years ago. While he recognizes the marks that time has chiseled on her face and body and the streaks of gray in her hair, he still can see her at twenty four, in the backyard of the property they still live on, amongst the piles of leaves they’d been raking, her deep green eyes lighting up her face.

She sees him as he is, too thin, gaunt, with the remaining hair left on his head having turned pure white. Every morning, she wakes up with him beside her, and when she looks at him, she sees a clock, counting down the days left until the morning comes that his side of the bed will be empty and cold.

They’d bought the house, a simple 1200 square foot ranch on a two and a half acre parcel on a remote dead end road in what was left of a sleepy small town that was in the final stages of being consumed by the spreading sprawl of suburbia, in November of 1984. She worked seven miles to the north as a paralegal in a local law firm, while he was working as a computer programmer /analyst at the power plant nine miles to the south. He was 26 years old, she was 24. They’d been married for a little bit more than three years.

Now, in 2019, they still live in the same house, having added a second floor and doubling the living space in 1998. They raised three children, two sons and a daughter, all grown and successful and on their own now. His career ended in 2012, when the Parkinson’s Disease he was diagnosed with in 2004 progressed to the point to make working too difficult.

In 2015, he survived the severe blockage of three arteries and triple bypass surgery

After the heart surgery, he lost twenty five, then thirty, then thirty-five pounds, thanks to a new regime of diet, exercise, and a combination of a statins and baby aspirin that cut his overall cholesterol in half, by more than a hundred points. Weighing the same as he did when he graduated high school was a source of pride until thirty five became forty and forty forty five. When forty five became fifty pounds without even trying, he became concerned. The diagnosis confirmed their worst fears.

They both struggled dealing with the news. For the first couple of days and nights, things were uncharacteristically quiet between them. She was consumed by fears of what life would be without him, how she’d cope with the emptiness that would consume the house they’d lived in all these years.

He spent most of the time in his head, replaying memories like Youtube videos. He kept returning to that Saturday in December of 1984 and he came to the conclusion that it ranked right up there with the birth of his children among the best days of his life.

It was a brisk and grey late autumn day, and it was just her and him, the rest of the world didn’t exist, each raking and burning their own piles of leaves, underneath the two giant maple trees in their yard. They’d only owned the place for a month, and though they’d raked leaves many times before, this was the first time they raked their leaves that fell from their trees onto their lawn. And that was all, the world belonged to them, and it was such heady and intoxicating stuff that is was inevitable they’d end up in bed, making love in the early afternoon. He remembered how she looked and felt, the warm smoothness of her skin, the smell of smoke in her hair, the sweet taste of her kisses, and the perfection of how their bodies fit together.

Returning to the deep night of 2019, he rolled over in the darkness and wrapped his arm around her waist, and she clasped his hand in hers. They both lay there, awake with their eyes closed in the dark, somewhere between their best and last days together.

A couple of weeks ago, about three months in advance of his seventieth (!) birthday, Bruce Springsteen released his nineteenth studio album, Western Stars. It’s unlike anything he’s done before while remaining unmistakably Bruce. It’s the voice in his lyrics and the characters he speaks through that hasn’t changed.

Musically, it’s almost entirely acoustic, but unlike previous acoustic masterpieces like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, it’s much more than Bruce in a chair with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. Instead, it’s filled with lush, country-ish orchestral arrangements that hearken back to the late 60s and early 70s work of Harry Nilsson and especially the hit making collaborations of Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb; sounds of the American west, particularly Arizona and Southern California. Musically, it’s about as far away from the New Jersey sound of guitars and saxophones as one could get without leaving the USA.

Thematically, the album is about fear and isolation, love and death, all things he’s sung about before, but never as openly and urgently.

To summarize the themes of the album, let’s take a look at what in my humble opinion are its two best songs.

In the song “Western Stars,” Springsteen takes on the role of a washed up cowboy actor who is barely hanging on, to life, sexual potency, and relevance. The song opens with the character pleased to be simply waking and that he hasn’t been taken to “the whispering grasses” of Forest Lawn cemetery.

Then he’s at work, filming a television commercial, refusing the makeup girl’s offer of a shot of gin and raw eggs in favor of a Viagra for an unidentified lover.

We’re only into the first verse, and, as is one of his gifts, Springsteen has told us everything we need to know in as few words as possible. We know this is a guy consumed with fear; fear of death, fear of sexual impotence.

The incredible second verse shows us more:

Here in the canyons above Sunset, the desert don’t give up the fight
A coyote with someone’s Chihuahua in its teeth skitters ‘cross my veranda in the night
Some lost sheep from Oklahoma sips her Mojito down at the Whiskey Bar
Smiles and says she thinks she remembers me from that commercial with the credit card

Nature is still exerting its dominance even amongst the encroachment of real estate represented by the reference to Sunset Boulevard. The desert remains a dark and wild place, a place where coyotes prey upon landowners’ small dogs. Then the verse takes a turn, referencing a new face, “some lost sheep from Oklahoma”, and the predator and prey metaphor is made, although it’s really not clear who is predator and who is prey.

The next verse had me puzzled for a bit, but the video I think helped clear it up for me:

Some days I take my El Camino, throw my saddle in and go
East to the desert where the Charros, they still ride and rope
Our American brothers cross the wire and bring the old ways with them
Tonight the western stars are shining bright again

“Charros” are Mexican cowboys who observe the old ways of doing things. These days, it seems doubtful that they are still riding around the southwest U.S. In the video, Springsteen is alone in this part of the song. I think the sight of them “riding and roping” is illusory, that they are merely ghosts and that the old ways, like the singer himself, are fading and fading fast.

The next verse is devastating:

Once I was shot by John Wayne, yeah, it was towards the end
That one scene’s bought me a thousand drinks, set me up and I’ll tell it for you, friend
Here’s to the cowboys, riders in the whirlwind
Tonight the western stars are shining bright again
And the western stars are shining bright again

All he has left that’s of any interest to anybody is the same old story about how he was once shot by the Duke himself in a movie that has to be at least forty five years old now. He’s been getting drinks off of that story ever since, and he offers to tell it again if you’re willing to pay the price. He then raises a toast to all the cowboys, “riders in the whirlwind,” and we’re not sue if he’s referring to real cowboys or the movies version, western “stars” like John Wayne.

The song reaches its conclusion:

Tonight the riders on Sunset are smothered in the Santa Ana winds
And the western stars are shining bright again

The “cowboys riding in the whirlwind” have been replaced by commuters down Sunset Boulevard “smothered in the Santa Anna winds.”

The singer is left alone, aging, and irrelevant to the “riders on Sunset.”

. . .

“Moonlight Motel” closes the album out, and it’s as great a song as Springsteen has written in a long, long time.

The song begins with the narrator looking back into his past, and his memories are rich with sensory detail that has retained its grip on him even after the passing of an unspecified period of time:

There’s a place on a blank stretch of road where
Nobody travels and nobody goes and the
Deskman says these days ’round here
Where two young folks could probably up and disappear into
Rustlin’ sheets, a sleepy corner room
Into the musty smell
Of wilted flowers and lazy afternoon hours
At the Moonlight Motel

The images are vivid and multi-layered, reflecting both the physical decay of the Motel and the aging of the narrator. The details that Springsteen chooses and the language he uses to describe them are nothing if not poetic:

Now the pool’s filled with empty, eight foot deep
Got dandelions growin’ up through the cracks in the concrete
Chain-link fence half-rusted away
Got a sign, says, “Children, be careful how you play”
Your lipstick taste and your whispered secret
I promised I’d never tell
A half-drunk beer and your breath in my ear
At the Moonlight Motel

The images of rust and decay are balanced with memories of the intimacy the lovers shared.

In the next verse, the responsibilities and routine of the everyday eat away at that intimacy, and it’s interesting that Springsteen gives us precious little information about the woman that is being remembered so powerfully. Is he describing an extramarital affair? Or is it an ex-wife? Is he a widower? All we know is that for whatever reason, she’s gone, and he’s alone, feeling a profound sense of loss

Well then, it’s bills and kids and kids and bills
And the ringing of the bell
Across the valley floor through the dusty screen door
Of the Moonlight Motel

In the next verse, she visits him in a dream, and the wind blows icy cold. He wakes up to something she said, that “it’s better to have loved.” His sense of loss is so powerful that he is compelled to drive to the motel in the middle of the night:

Last night I dreamed of you, my love
And the wind blew through the window and blew off the covers
Of my lonely bed, I woke to something you said
That it’s better to have loved, yeah, it’s better to have loved
As I drove, there was a chill in the breeze
And leaves tumbled from the sky and fell
On a road so black as I backtracked
To the Moonlight Motel

The images of the drive to the motel, of “a chill in the breeze” and leaves tumbling from the sky to land on “a road so black” are beautiful and haunting even as they represent death, and it becomes clear that the lover being longed for has died.

He arrives at the motel only to find it “boarded up and gone.” He pulls into his old spot in the parking lot and pours two shots of Jack Daniels and says his last goodbye to things once important to him – his lover, the motel and his youth:

She was boarded up and gone like an old summer song
Nothing but an empty shell
I pulled in and stopped into my old spot

I pulled a bottle of Jack out of a paper bagPoured one for me and one for you as wellThen it was one more shot poured out onto the parking lotTo the Moonlight Motel

In the end, the guy in “Moonlight Motel” isn’t the tragic figure of ”Western Stars,” he’s just a guy, the same guy who’s inhabited so many of Springsteen’s songs for close to fifty years now. In Western Stars, we find this guy carrying the same baggage of loss and fear that we all carry as we approach our final destination. By recognizing and exploring this baggage, Springsteen makes it a little lighter for us to carry.